The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 (7 page)

“No, no, no,” she said, and found herself crying. “And you don't like girls. You don't like girls.”

“I like everybody,” he said, his palm on her chest, hand heel hard.

And she lifted her head and looked at him, and he was Larry.

She knew he was Larry.

Larry.

Until he became Benny again, mustache and grin, but fear in that grin still.

“I'm sorry, Penny,” he said, stepping back. “I'm flattered, but I don't go that way.”

“What?” she said, looking down, seeing her fingers clamped on his trouser waist. “Oh. Oh.”

Back at Number Three, they both drank from tall tumblers, breathing hungrily.

“You shouldn't go back in there,” Benny said. “We need to call the gas company in the morning.”

Mr. Flant said she could stay on their sofa that night, if they could make room under all the old newspapers.

“You shouldn't have looked in there,” he said to Benny, shaking his head. “The oven. It's like whistling in a cemetery.”

A towel wrapped around his shoulders, Benny was shivering. He was so white.

“I didn't see anything,” he kept saying. “I didn't see a goddamned thing.”

She was dreaming.

“You took my book!”

In the dream she'd risen from Mr. Flant's sofa, slick with sweat, and opened the door. Although nearly midnight, the courtyard was mysteriously bright, all the plants gaudy and pungent.

Wait. Had someone said something?

“Larry gave it to me!”

Penny's body was moving so slowly, like she was caught in molasses.

The door to Number Four was open, and Mrs. Stahl was emerging from it, something red in her hand.

“You took it while I slept, didn't you? Sneak thief! Thieving whore!”

When Mrs. Stahl began charging at her, her robe billowing like great scarlet wings, Penny thought she was still dreaming.

“Stop,” Penny said, but the woman was so close.

It had to be a dream, and in dreams you can do anything, so Penny raised her arms high, clamping down on those scarlet wings as they came toward her.

The book slid from her pocket, and both of them grappled for it, but Penny was faster, grabbing it and pushing back, pressing the volume against the old woman's neck until she stumbled, heels tangling.

It had to be a dream because Mrs. Stahl was so weak, weaker than any murderess could possibly be, her body like that of a yarn doll, limp and flailing.

There was a flurry of elbows, clawing hands, the fat golden beetle ring on Mrs. Stahl's gnarled hand against Penny's face.

Then, with one hard jerk, the old woman fell to the ground with such ease, her head clacking against the courtyard tiles.

The rat-a-tat-tat of blood from her mouth, her ear.

“Penny!” A voice came from behind her. It was Mr. Flant, standing in his doorway, hand to his mouth.

“Penny, what did you
do
?”

Her expression when she'd faced Mr. Flant must have been meaningful, because he had immediately retreated inside his bungalow, the door locking with a click.

But it was time anyway. Of that she felt sure.

Walking into Number Four, she almost felt herself smiling.

One by one, she removed all the tacks from her makeshift kitchen door, letting the towel drop onto her forearm.

The kitchen was dark, and smelled as it never had. No apricots, no jasmine, and no gas. Instead, the tinny smell of must, wallpaper paste, rusty water.

Moving slowly, purposefully, she walked directly to the oven, the moonlight striking it. White and monstrous, a glowing smear.

Its door shut.

Cold to the touch.

Kneeling down, she crawled behind it, to the spot Benny had been struck by.

What's this?
he'd said.

As in a dream, which this had to be, she knew what to do, her palm sliding along the cherry-sprig wallpaper down by the baseboard.

She saw the spot, the wallpaper gaping at its seam, seeming to breathe. Inhale, exhale.

Penny's hand went there, pulling back, the paper glue dried to fine dust under her hand.

She was remembering Mrs. Stahl.
I put up fresh wallpaper over every square inch after it happened. I covered everything with wallpaper.

What did she think she would see, breathing hard, her knees creaking and her forehead pushed against the wall?

The paper did not come off cleanly, came off in pieces, strands, like her hair after the dose Mr. D. passed to her, making her sick for weeks.

A patch of wall exposed, she saw the series of gashes, one after the next, as if someone had jabbed a knife into the plaster. A hunting knife. Though there seemed a pattern, a hieroglyphics.

Squinting, the kitchen so dark she couldn't see.

Reaching up to the oven, she grabbed for a kitchen match.

Leaning close, the match lit, she could see a faint scrawl etched deep.

The little men come out of the walls. I cut off

their heads every night. My mind is gone.

Tonight, I end my life.

I hope you find this.

Goodbye.

Penny leaned forward, pressed her palm on the words.

This is what mattered most, nothing else.

“Oh, Larry,” she said, her voice catching with grateful tears. “I see them too.”

The sound that followed was the loudest she'd ever heard, the fire sweeping up her face.

The detective stood in the center of the courtyard, next to a banana tree with its top shorn off, a smoldering slab of wood, the front door to the blackened bungalow on the ground in front of him.

The firemen were dragging their equipment past him. The gurney with the dead girl long gone.

“Pilot light. Damn near took the roof off,” one of the patrolmen said. “The kitchen looks like the Blitz. But only one scorched, inside. The girl. Or what's left of her. Could've been much worse.”

“That's always true,” the detective said, a billow of smoke making them both cover their faces.

Another officer approached him.

“Detective Noble, we talked to the pair next door,” he said. “They said they warned the girl not to go back inside. But she'd been drinking all day, saying crazy things.”

“How's the landlady?”

“Hospital.”

Noble nodded. “We're done.”

It was close to two. But he didn't want to go home yet. It was a long drive to Eagle Rock anyway.

And the smell, and what he'd seen in that kitchen—he didn't want to go home yet.

At the top of the road he saw the bar, its bright lights beckoning.

The Carnival Tavern, the one with the roof shaped like a big top.

Life is a carnival,
he said to himself, which is what the detective might say, wryly, in the books his wife loved to read.

He couldn't believe it was still there. He remembered it from before the war. When he used to date that usherette at the Hollywood Bowl.

A quick jerk to the wheel and he was pulling into its small lot, those crazy clown lanterns he remembered from all those years ago.

Inside, everything was warm and inviting, even if the waitress had a sour look.

“Last call,” she said, leaving him his rye. “We close in ten minutes.”

“I just need to make a quick call,” he said.

He stepped into one of the telephone booths in the back, pulling the accordion door shut behind him.

“Yes, I have that one,” his wife replied, stifling a yawn. “But it's not a dirty book.”

Then she laughed a little in a way that made him bristle.

“So what kind of book is it?” he asked.

“Books mean different things to different people,” she said. She was always saying stuff like that, just to show him how smart she was.

“You know what I mean,” he said.

She was silent for several seconds. He thought he could hear someone crying, maybe one of the kids.

“It's a mystery,” she said finally. “Not your kind. No one even dies.”

“Okay,” he said. He wasn't sure what he'd wanted to hear. “I'll be home soon.”

“It's a love story too,” she said, almost a whisper, strangely sad. “Not your kind.”

After he hung up, he ordered a beer, the night's last tug from the bartender's tap.

Sitting by the picture window, he looked down into the canyon, and up to the Hollywood sign. Everything about the moment felt familiar. He'd worked this precinct for twenty years, minus three to Uncle Sam, so even the surprises were the same.

He thought about the girl, about her at the station. Her nervous legs, that worn dress of hers, the plea in her voice.

Someone should think of her for a minute, shouldn't they?

He looked at his watch. Two a.m. But she won't see her little men tonight.

A busboy with a pencil mustache came over with a long stick. One by one, he turned off all the dingy lanterns that hung in the window. The painted clowns faced the canyon now. Closing time.

“Don't miss me too much,” he told the sour waitress as he left.

In the parking lot, looking down into the canyon, he noticed he could see the Canyon Arms, the smoke still settling on the bungalow's shell, black as a mussel. Her bedroom window, glass blown out, curtains shuddering in the night breeze.

He was just about to get in his car when he saw them. The little men.

They were dancing across the hood of his car, the canyon beneath him.

Turning, he looked up at the bar, the lanterns in the window, spinning, sending their dancing clowns across the canyon, across the Canyon Arms, everywhere.

He took a breath.

“That happens every night?” he asked the busboy as the young man hustled down the stairs into the parking lot.

Pausing, the busboy followed his gaze, then nodded. “Every night,” he said. “Like a dream.”

STEVE ALMOND

FROM
Cincinnati Review

L
OOMIS WAS HEADED
out of work, or out of his
workplace,
which is what you were supposed to call it now, so that later when the TV vans showed up and disgorged their heartbroken androids they would be able to utter sentences such as “The suspect was a familiar and friendly presence in his workplace . . .” Anyhoo, he was done for the day—done whoring himself to the hipster lords of Marketing, done creating
content
—and just a few steps from his car when two men appeared in his path. They wore vintage suits. The larger of the two had a furrowed scar that curled across one cheek. “You gotta minute here?” he said.

“What?” said Loomis.

“We were hoping for a few words.” The men were suddenly very close to him, smelling of matches and Brut.

Loomis had taken off early to beat traffic and was parked in the back of the building. Bobito the Security Guard was doubtless sprawled out in the smoker alcove, flirting with HR specialists who were going to fuck him only if their lives took a harrowing turn.

“A few words about what?” Loomis said.

The pair scanned the parking lot.

“Are you guys FBI or something?”

The one with the scar winced. “Afraid not.”

“It's about the thank-you notes,” said the smaller one. He had the velvety rasp of Tony Bennett and a Roman nose that had been derailed a few times.

“What thank-you notes?”

“For the kid's party,” Scarface said.

“The kid?”

“
Your
kid. The older one. Isabelle.”

“Isadora?”

“Right.”

“How the hell do you know the name of my daughter?”

Scarface set a hand on Loomis's shoulder. It was a tender gesture that suggested profound brutality. “Settle down,” he said. “There's no reason for this to turn in the wrong direction.”

Tony Bennett patted his coat in the way of an ex-smoker. “Quicker we clear this thing up, quicker we're out of your hair.”

“What thing?” Loomis couldn't figure out how frightened he should be. He had to pee rather ardently.

“A beautiful day like this,” Scarface said. He gestured toward the sky as if the director of a community theater production had just stage-whispered at him to gesture toward the sky. “Who wants to be standing around in a parking lot? Not me.”

“To review,” Tony Bennett said. “You throw this party, what, two weeks ago? All these kids bringing your daughter gifts and whatnot. So then, just as a common—”

“How do you know what's going on in my house?” Loomis said. “Have you been spying on us?”

Scarface exhaled through his nose, as if he'd been expecting Loomis to behave this way and it bored him. “Nobody's spying on anybody. You're missing the point, Mr. Loomis. Just
listen.
”

“As a courtesy,” Tony Bennett continued, “your wife went out and bought some nice thank-you cards. And you, Mr. Loomis, told her there was no need to waste good money on such an extravagance. Then you threw the cards straight into the
garbagio.
”

“I didn't throw them in the garbage,” Loomis said. “I dropped them into a wastepaper basket. I was making a point.”

Scarface ran a thumb down his nose. “What exact point would that be, Mr. Loomis?”

“That it was overkill. We'd already thrown these kids a whole party with lunch and two art activities and gift bags, and I was just sick and tired of feeding into this never-ending arms race of bourgeois pieties.”

Tony Bennett yawned. “I don't understand what you just said, Mr. Loomis. But I didn't like the tone.” He stretched in such a way as to make visible the outline of something gun-buttish against his sport coat.